Karaoke Saver: the DIY Breathalyzer Microphone

You know how karaoke is really fun until someone drinks a little too much and starts majorly hogging the mic for their less-than-moving versions of American Pie and N*Sync B-sides? Now you can shut them down with cold, hard facts about their blood alcohol content, by employing this sneaky breathalyzer microphone.

This nifty project was created by Randy at F.A.T. He says, “The breathalyzer microphone is a system for the inconspicuous collection of blood-alcohol content level data sets. In other words, you can measure a person’s sobriety with a device, that for all intents and purposes, looks no different than a standard microphone.”

He kindly put the how-to up on Instructables, in case you’re inspired to make one of these for use on your drinking buddies. In essence, you rip a cheap karaoke mic apart, add some wires to the XLR and the switch, make a tricky bracket, attach it to an alcohol sensor you previously ordered from Thailand, and voila. To make it portable, you can use a tape deck or something else to hide a datalogger and arduino.

Then you just have someone talk or sing into the microphone, and use a computer to get the SD card readings to get the info. Now you know fo’ sho’, that mofo is DRUNK. And you have computer data to prove it to him.